I've heard it postulated that whales leave tracks when they want to be detected and slip around silently when they don't. I watched some sell offs in POT in March/April where the chart reflected the moves of the institutional sellers. T&S was filled with selling by two institutional sellers in particular and price moved steadily down. OTOH I saw a big buyer on T&S Friday who seemed to have no effect on price. Meaningful or random?
Without a chart its not much information to go on. Keep in mind that if the high volume print comes in at a high that can signal exhaustion on a move, a spike in volume at high and low shown with a volume histogram. While not specific to your post if you watch some videos on Market Delta you will see what I am talking about or put up a volume histogram. Its useful to use these concepts in context of S/R HOD, LOD, PDH or PDL etc.
Thanks for your reply. Sorry, I mistitled this thread. Because the broker id is listed on my t&s (on the TSX) it is clear who is buying and selling. On Friday, between 3pm and 4pm, one buyer bought 45,600 shares of POT for example (mostly in 100 share lots), but the chart gives you no clue that this is accumulation going on. There is so much back and forth buying/selling among the MM's that I just ignore their transactions, but I notice when someone else is in there repeatedly buying or selling. What I am asking is how to interpret it, or better yet, how to use it as a predictor. My tinfoil hat theory was that on the big trend down day, either the sellers wanted to be seen or that the MM's wanted them to be seen. As it happened, this downtrending day was the beginning of many down days. But on Friday, it seemed as though the MMs allowed the buyer to accumulate without impacting the price. The only reason I could think of for a MM to do this would be if he believed price will gap up hugely soon. Why tip off all the parasitic traders like me? But perhaps this theory requires more paranoia than I am capable of. A less paranoid explanation is that the buyer caught the MM at a time that he was flush with inventory. Now if POT gaps up huge one day soon I may get the tinfoil out again.
It would be nice to have a summary level 2 by particpants. Maybe have bars that show prices purchased within the outline using colored dots for each particpant.
Are you suggesting that it would be nice for the broker to provide this? If so, I agree, but I doubt that it will happen. If I am remembering correctly, I used to see broker number on IB's Lvl 2 and t&s but they no longer provide it. I would not be at all surprised if TSX stops providing broker id's. Seems to me that anonymity was a selling point for competing brokerages.